⚰️ LetheMC

Death takes everything — including your ender chest — and sends you to Purgatory.

In Greek myth, Lethe is the river the dead drink from before rebirth, so that they remember nothing. That is the whole mod.

Death costs you everything you own. Purgatory holds you out of the server for a stretch of real time. And what comes back is a stranger.

🔒 The ender chest is the point

Every other death-penalty mod leaves the ender chest alone — which is why they are toothless. Players pre-stash their good gear, die, and shrug. LetheMC takes it. There is no safe-deposit box.

🪦 What happens when you die

1. Nothing drops. No body to loot, no items on the ground.
2. The death screen holds for fifteen seconds so you can read what killed you.
3. You are disconnected into Purgatory — locked out for a configurable stretch of real time, which keeps counting while the server is offline.
4. Your inventory, ender chest, XP, advancements and statistics are taken.
5. Rejoining shows a live countdown, and whether you can still be saved.

You leave Purgatory one of two ways.

🐺 It follows you out into the world

Your player files are not the only place your name is kept, so the reckoning does not stop there.

• Tamed animals are destroyed — wolves, cats, parrots, horses, donkeys, mules, llamas and camels, along with whatever they were carrying. A loaded chest donkey parked somewhere safe is not a death-proof vault.
• Foxes forget you, and a fox no living player trusts goes with them.
• Trial vaults forget that a past life already looted them — so a reincarnated player is not silently refused by a vault they have never opened.
• Villagers forget what they thought of you. The trade discounts of a past life do not follow you into one that did nothing to earn them.
• A trading hall you alone built is destroyed. Villagers anyone living still trades with are left completely alone.

And while you are in Purgatory, none of it can be touched — not ridden, not opened, not harmed, not traded with. You are offline and cannot defend it, so nobody empties your donkey or rescues your villagers while you wait.

⚙️ Built for admins

Every behaviour above is a config key, settable in-game and applied immediately. Keep the pets. Spare the villagers. Leave statistics alone. Rewrite every message. Turn off anything you do not want.

Two separate permissions decide who dies and who can resurrect, so you are not forced to choose between having admins and having stakes. By default nobody is exempt — you can save other people, and you die exactly like everyone else.

Admins cannot resurrect themselves. A genuinely unfair death is still recoverable — by another admin, or from the server console.

💀 Hardcore

Recommended, not required. LetheMC runs on any world; hardcore is what it was written around, and it locks difficulty to Hard.

Hardcore is baked into level.dat when a world is created, so server.properties cannot convert an existing one — vanilla ignores the setting and says nothing about it. LetheMC warns you when the two disagree, and /lethemc admin hardcore on converts the world for you.

📥 Install

Drop the jar in mods/ and start the server. On Fabric it also needs Fabric API; on NeoForge it needs nothing else. Players install nothing — a vanilla client just connects.

🖥️ Dedicated servers only. In a single-player world LetheMC stands down and does nothing. Purgatory is a lockout enforced at login and lifted early only by an admin — a single-player save has neither, so a death would shut you out of your own world until the timer ran out.

☕ Java 25 is required. The jar is compiled to Java 25 and will not load on an older runtime.

⚠️ pause-when-empty-seconds must be 0. A paused server stops ticking exactly when the last player leaves — usually the one who just died — so the wipe would silently never happen. LetheMC refuses to run rather than half-work, and the console says exactly why.

Setting this up on a world you already have? There are ordered instructions for both a new server and an existing one in the full README.

🧩 More mods

Part of Lunixia's Minecraft QOL Mods.